What affect do reviews have?
-
Hello all.
Currently, I am seriously considering including a customer reviews panel on the product pages of my ecommerce site. Does anyone have any previous experience, bad or good. Also, what sort of affect do positive/negative reviews have on search engine rankings.
Your advice would be greatly appreciated.
-
Thanks Ria and Patrick...thumbs up for you both. Definitely seems worth doing. Hadn't thought of it from a fresh content perspective. Totally relate to not buying a product without looking at reviews first, good ratings are very powerful.
-
Hi there
There are a couple benefits here:
Review Schema - Schema when it comes to reviews helps with rich snippets. It's also shown that pages with Schema rank better in search results which helps your organic visibility. Don't forget product Schema as well!
Increasing Chances of Conversion - I can't tell you how often I look at reviews of products before I buy them. People want to know other people who purchased items had a great experience with not only the product, but the company as well. These are all trust signals, and it's important to users and customers. Remember to not only look at this from the product standpoint, but the company standpoint as well.
I would say the better the review the more click throughs you will have from search, and the worse the review the less. Remember, Google just displays what reviews it finds on your site and other sites like Yelp. It's up to you and your company to provide nothing less than a stellar experience. If you can do that, you'll have no issue!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
I've only had good experiences from this. It's an opportunity for user-generated content that keeps the page "fresh" (with natural usage of the products keywords) for Google. And the reviews themselves provide customers with a trust factor for the product which can encourage more sales on the page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Any Success Getting Fake 5 Star Google My Business Reviews Removed From Competitors?
Hi, I am working on a competitor who is obviously building up fake reviews using a 3rd party service. I need to build more evidence. A majority of his reviews on Google My Business, they are done by reviewers with very few reviews (no profile pic), and that seem to review 3-4 companies in the Chicagoland area the exact same day. This happens again and again. It started about 1.5 years ago. Before that everything looks normal. Any idea how much proof I need to actually get those reviews and/or his company removed? I am working on getting access to a private group on Facebook where he talks about it. Thanks in advance!
Reviews and Ratings | | vetofunk1 -
Marking up an iframe with reviews schema. Possible? Ethical?
Hey there fellow Mozzers! I work with a broad variety of clients, many of them local businesses, and they in turn sometimes find a vendor that stumps me. This is one of those special cases, where the vendor is doing some shady stuff with reviews schema. First, they're taking reviews from third party sites and filtering them to only show 4 and 5 star reviews (red flag #1), then they're asking us to post them to the website (red flag #2) and finally they are marking them up with schema (red flag #3). If this were my vendor I would have fired them when they started telling me Google doesn't care, doesn't enforce the guidelines, and all that other nonsense, but hey, I'm not the client and I have to make good for them. I did flat out refuse to place these reviews as they asked, but they came back with a "solution", that I'm not sure I trust. They're telling me they can't remove the schema (red flag #4), but they can iframe it onto the website. Their logic, which is wrong, is that Google can't/doesn't crawl iframes so therefore the reviews can be displayed without any negative consequence. I obviously have some ethical concerns with this, but I have to provide the service to my client whether or not they share my values. However, I can object on professional grounds if I think they will take on undue risk. My only problem here is that I have no documentation for how this proposed solution would work. Working through this logically still leaves me with a gap, and that's where you folks come in!
Reviews and Ratings | | brettmandoes
A) We know that Google crawls iframes
B) We know that Google can apply schema within iframes (works with YouTube embeds)
C) We know that content within an iframe is technically on another website, so it doesn't normally apply to your website
D) I don't know how specifically reviews schema would interact with an iframe
E) I don't know if this would result in Google triggering an alarm and blocking the business I'm hoping you guys can help me figure this out. Ethics aside (making me cringe to type that) is this technically feasible without risk, or would this still be a risky move? For the record, another client tried filtering their reviews while marking up with schema against my recommendation and got caught, and received a penalty alert. They were removed from results until the problem was fixed.0 -
Paid review service stars in search ads - why is that allowed?
I'm looking at paid review services like Trustpilot, FeeFo and others. I'm told I can filter out bad reviews, which I can't do with my Google Certified Stores reviews. I'm struggling to understand why Google include these in the reviews it uses for the star ratings in search ads. I know it's a different thing, but surely these reviews are in breach of the rules that Google apply to their own "My Business" reviews? They talk about "Conflict of interest: Reviews are most valuable when they are honest and unbiased" here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/2622994?hl=en Does anyone have a take on whether Google will drop these as the momentum builds in collection of their own reviews? Thanks, Paul
Reviews and Ratings | | PaulS710 -
Query on Product Reviews
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site I am using third party review service. Now my query is :- The reviews which is showing on my third party site if same review I can show on my product so will google consider this as duplicate content? Now that product listed on one of the category and that category page before footer section I have section of "Recently Reviewed" section in that section also it is showing same review of that product so is it fine? Will google consider it as duplicate content? Lastly I do have few subcategory pages before footer section I have section of "Recently Reviewed" section in that section also it is showing same review of that product so is it fine? Will google consider it as duplicate content?Note - Image attached of Review section - Which is visible on category and subcategory pages.FYI - This I am doing for two purpose 1) For Visitors purpose so he or she will know reviews about my products 2) As it is customer own written reviews so my pages will get fresh content.Please share your viewsBiKmp
Reviews and Ratings | | wright3350 -
Google maps, G+ and Google reviews on right hand side of results page:
Hi Guys Happy Monday! I have been having a real headache trying to the get that panel on the right hand side of the Google results showing up when my company brand is entered as a search query. From all the research that I have done, it looks as though you can't have this panel showing unless you serve customers face to face in your place of work. Is this necessarily true? Our biggest competitor has a very stripped down version of this box which just contains the image from their Google+ page and also a link to their wikipedia page but the point is it shows up when you search for their brand... ours doesn't? Has anyone else recently configured this to work for their website? Any advice? Cheers in advance! Jamie
Reviews and Ratings | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Publishing testimonials on your site that are from your Google + (or other review sites page)
Ive got a site with some good Google + Reviews and some other good reviews on other sites that id like to be able to publish on a testimonials page on our website, but im worried about being penalised for duplicate content. Any idea of the best way to get these reviews on to our website, i was thinking about placing the text in as an image, but id prefer to do something semantic if at all possible. (I know that some review sites have javascript widgets you can use to pull in your reviews but for most of the sites we are reviewed on they dont)
Reviews and Ratings | | Sam-P0 -
Customer Reviews & Message Boards
Hi there, Is there any value to responding to negative reviews that are older than this year? I have some that span from 2009 until now, as well as negative message board posts. Another question, to mitigate this, should I have the client respond to just reviews or actually get on the message boards as well and address some issues that have been brought up with the company? Some are specific customer complains, some are just talking about the company in general. Thanks!
Reviews and Ratings | | sarahbeth2191 -
Too many reviews too quickly?
Is there any sort of guideline on this? Right now, we have very few google reviews. However, I've cross referenced a list of our happiest clients with people who have g+ accounts. There are at least 12 clients, I feel strongly would write us g+ reviews if I asked them to. I want to just get the word out today, but I'm worried if 8-12 reviews in a week would red flag us. I've heard that getting too many reviews to quickly can be a problem, but I'm thinking that more like 100 than 10, but I have no idea. Most of my competitors don't have any reviews, and the most any of them have is 10. I don't know if that matters at all either in terms of triggering a red flag. I'd appreciate whatever insight you all could give. Thanks, Ruben
Reviews and Ratings | | KempRugeLawGroup0